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Erasure by Percival Everett. Hanover. 2001. University Press of New England. 1584650907. 265 pages. hardcover. Cover photo by Elliott Erwitt.

  
DESCRIPTION - Avant-garde novelist, college professor, woodworker, and fly fisherman - Thelonious (Monk) Ellison has never allowed race to define his identity. But as both a writer and an African American, he is offended and angered by the success of WE'S LIVES IN DA GHETTO, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days. Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection. Even as his career as a writer appears to have stalled, Monk finds himself coping with changes in his personal life. Forced to assume responsibility for a mother rapidly succumbing to Alzheimer's, Monk leaves his home in Los Angeles to return to the Washington D. C. house in which he grew up. There he must come to terms with his ailing mother, his siblings, his own childhood and youth, and the legacy of his physician father, a suicide some seven years before. In need of distraction from old memories, new responsibilities, and his professional stagnation, Monk composes, in a heat of inspiration and energy, a fierce parody of the sort of exploitative, ghetto wanna-be lit represented by WE'S LIVES IN DA GHETTO. But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk - or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh - is offered money, fame, success beyond anything he has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems. Percival Everett's most recent novel, the academic satire GLYPH, was hailed b the New York Times as ‘both a treatise and a romp. This new novel combines a touching story of a man coming to terms with his family heritage and a satiric indictment of race and publishing in America.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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I Wake Up Screaming by Steve Fisher. Berkeley. 1988. Black Lizard Books. 0887390854. Originally Published In 1960. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - The classic novel of sexual obsession and murder amid the star-making machinery of Hollywood in the 1950s. ‘She was as white as marble, but she looked lovely. Her hair was splayed out in fine strands of gold, and her lips were bright, rich red, and there was a green eyeshadow on her eyelids. You could see that because her eyes were closed and she was lying very still. She was lying still and she wasn't breathing.' With its portraits of washed-up directors, jaded leading men, and a ruthless cop whose one-track mind leads straight to a cyanide pellet, I WAKE UP SCREAMING is a magnificent thriller by a Hollywood insider whose screenplays included Lady in the Lake and I, Mobster. .

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Stephen Gould Fisher (August 29, 1912 - March 27, 1980) was an American author best known for his pulp stories, novels and screenplays. He is one of the few pulp authors to go on to enjoy success as both an author in “slick” magazines, such as the Saturday Evening Post, and as an in-demand writer in Hollywood. Steve Fisher was born 29 August 1912, in Marine City, Michigan. He was raised in Los Angeles, California, where he attended Oneonta Military Academy until running away to join the Navy at the age of sixteen. Fisher spent four years in the Navy submarine service, during which time he wrote prolifically, selling stories to U.S. Navy and Our Navy. After Fisher's discharge from the Navy, he settled in Greenwich Village, New York, where he decided to pursue writing as a career. The first few months proved difficult. Fisher could not sell a story and suffered eviction from two apartments, and once had his electricity shut off. In March 1934, however, he would publish his first story, “Hell's Scoop,” in Sure-Fire Detective Magazine, beginning a career of considerable literary success. Fisher's "Mistress Death" was the cover story on the May–June 1936 issue of New Mystery Adventures. Fisher published extensively in pulps throughout the 1930s, ‘40s and into the ‘50s. Magazines that featured his stories include Spicy Mystery Stories, Thrilling Detective, True Gang Life, Detective Fiction Weekly, The Shadow, New Mystery Adventures, Underground Detective, The Mysterious Fu Wang, The Phantom Detective, Ace Detective, Saucy Romantic Adventures, Mystery Adventure, Detective Tales, The Whisperer, Headquarters Detective, Hardboiled, Doc Savage, Feds, Federal Agent, Popular Detective, Clues, Detective Romances, Crime Busters, Pocket Detective and Detective Story Magazine. Some of Fisher's most significant stories, however, would be published in Black Mask, the seminal detective magazine. Famous Mask editor Joe Shaw rejected early submissions by Fisher, but under the editorship of Fanny Ellsworth, Fisher would help create a more emotional, psychological crime story, different from his hard-boiled Mask predecessors. Fisher stated, “[My] subjective style, mood and approach to a story was the antithesis of [a] Roger Torrey who, like Hammett, wrote objectively, with crisp, cold precision”. “The more emotionally charged style caught on and was featured in a number of detective pulps,” helping to establish a place for similar authors, such as Fisher's friend Cornell Woolrich. In total Fisher would publish nine stories in Black Mask: “Death of a Dummy,” “Flight to Paris,” “Hollywood Party,” “Jake and Jill,” “Latitude Unknown,” “Murder at Eight,” “No Gentleman Strangles His Wife,” “Wait for Me,” “You'll Always Remember Me,”. Fisher would also break into slick magazines during this period, a rare feat for a pulp writer. His stories saw simultaneous publication in pulps and in slicks such as Liberty, Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan and American Magazine to name a few. He would also publish under the pennames Stephen Gould and Grant Lane, and would go on to publish hundreds of stories in pulp and slick magazines including Lt. Commander Sheridan Doome detective novels. Struggling financially, Fisher moved to Paris in 1939 to work and live more affordably. After only six month, his agent, H. N. Swanson, sold the stories “If You Break My Heart” and “Shore Leave” to Hollywood for film adaptation. Fisher returned to Hollywood where he would work for much of the remainder of his life as a screenwriter. Fisher wrote the screenplays for such notable films noir as Dead Reckoning and Lady in the Lake. He would also spent time writing novels, most notably I Wake Up Screaming, which was made into a film by the same name starring Victor Mature. During the 1970s, Fisher experienced great success writing for television, including such shows as Starsky & Hutch, McMillan & Wife and Barnaby Jones. He died of a heart attack on March 27, 1980 at his home in Canoga Park, Los Angeles, age 67.

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The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. New York. 1952. Lion.  356 pages. paperback. Lion #99.  

DESCRIPTION - Lou Ford is the deputy sheriff of a small town in Texas. The worst thing most people can say against him is that he's a little slow and a little boring. But, then, most people don't know about the sickness--the sickness that almost got Lou put away when he was younger. The sickness that is about to surface again. An underground classic since its publication in 1952, The Killer Inside Me is the book that made Jim Thompson's name synonymous with the roman noir. In a small town in Texas there is a sheriff's deputy named Lou Ford, a man so dull that he lives in cliches, so good-natured that he doesn't even lay a finger on the drunks who come into his custody. But then, that would be too easy, for Lou's sickness requires other victims. . . . A nightmarish book of psychopathic evil. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Myers Thompson (September 27, 1906 - April 7, 1977) was an American author and screenwriter, known for his pulp crime fiction. Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications by pulp fiction houses, from the late-1940s through mid-1950s. Despite some positive critical notice, notably by Anthony Boucher in The New York Times, he was little-recognized in his lifetime. Only after death did Thompson's literary stature grow, when in the late 1980s, several novels were re-published in the Black Lizard series of re-discovered crime fiction. Thompson's writing culminated in a few of his best-regarded works: The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman and Pop. 1280. A number of Thompson's books became popular films, including The Getaway and The Grifters. The writer R.V. Cassill has suggested that of all pulp fiction, Thompson's was the rawest and most harrowing; that neither Dashiell Hammett nor Raymond Chandler nor even Horace McCoy, author of the bleak They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, ever ‘wrote a book within miles of Thompson'. Similarly, in the introduction to Now and on Earth, Stephen King says he most admires Thompson's work because ‘The guy was over the top. The guy was absolutely over the top. Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word stop. There are three brave lets inherent in the forgoing: he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it.' Thompson admired Fyodor Dostoyevsky and was nicknamed ‘Dimestore Dostoevsky' by writer Geoffrey O'Brien. Film director Stephen Frears, who directed an adaptation of Thompson's The Grifters as 1990's The Grifters, also identified elements of Greek tragedy in his themes.

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The Root of His Evil by James M. Cain. Berkeley. 1989. Black Lizard Books. 0887390870. Originally Published In 1951. paperback. Painted front cover by Kirwan.

  
DESCRIPTION - A thriller which tells of the deadly corrupting influence between love and money as one man falls desperately in love with an innocent girl who proves willing but inadequate in satisfying his overwhelming demands.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Mallahan Cain (1892 - 1977) was a first-rate writer of American hard-boiled crime fiction. Born in Baltimore, the son of the president of Washington College, Cain began his career as a reporter, serving in the American Expeditionary Force in World War I and writing for THE CROSS OF LORRAINE, the newspaper of the 79th Division. He returned from the war to embark on a literary career that included a professorship at St. John's College in Annapolis and a stint at The New Yorker as managing editor before he went to Hollywood as a script writer. Cain's famous first novel, The POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, was published in 1934 when he was forty-two, and became an instant sensation. It was tried for obscenity in Boston and was said by Albert Camus to have inspired his own book, THE STRANGER. The infamous novel was staged in 1936, and filmed in 1946 and 1981. The story of a young hobo who has an affair with a married woman and plots with her to murder her husband and collect his insurance, THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE is a benchmark of classic crime fiction and film noir. Two of Cain's other novels, MILDRED PIERCE (1941) and DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1943), were also made into film noir classics. In 1974, James M. Cain was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Cain published eighteen books in all and was working on his autobiography at the time of his death.

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His Name Was Death by Fredric Brown. Berkeley. 1987. Black Lizard Books. 0887390447. 139 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - Joyce Dugan had no idea she was about to commit an act that would instigate a chain of murders, but you know what they say: the first killing was hard, after that they were easy.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fredric Brown (October 29, 1906 - March 11, 1972) was an American science fiction and mystery writer. He was born in Cincinnati. He is perhaps best known for his use of humor and for his mastery of the "short short" form - stories of 1 to 3 pages, often with ingenious plotting devices and surprise endings. Humor and a somewhat postmodern outlook carried over into his novels as well. One of his stories, "Arena," is officially credited for an adaptation as an episode of the landmark television series, Star Trek.

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The Watcher by Dolores Hitchens. New York. 1961. Perma Books. 181 pages. paperback. M-4205.

  
DESCRIPTION - An anonymous letter triggers the police into reopening three cases of 'accidental' death. . . THE FACE OF TERROR. To the Chief of Police: During the last year I have killed three young people. I put down x here their names and xxxxxxxxxx their ages: Edith Tomlinson - Aged fifteen. Charles Carrol - Twelve, Barbara Martin - About eighteen. In each case, it seemed to me at the time xxxx that the child x was better off dead. I have chosen my fourth victim. I had hoped not to continue with this thing, but conditions are much too offensive not to demand the remedy. Perhaps this may be x taken, sensibly, as a warning. And perhaps this last death may be avoided. So x take heed. There was no signature. The rest of page was blank. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julia Clara Catharine Dolores Birk Olsen Hitchens (1907, San Antonio, Texas - 1973, San Antonio, Texas), better known as Dolores Hitchens, was an American mystery novelist who wrote prolifically from 1938 until her death. She also wrote as D. B. Olsen, a version of her first married name, and under the pseudonyms Dolan Birkley and Noel Burke. Hitchens collaborated on five railroad mysteries - 'police procedurals about a squad of railroad cops' - with her second husband, Bert Hitchens, a railroad detective. She also branched out into other genres including Western fiction. Many of her mystery novels centered on a spinster character named Rachel Murdock.Hitchens wrote Fool's Gold, the 1958 novel adapted by Jean-Luc Godard for his film Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964). Her novel, The Watcher, was adapted for an episode of the TV series 'Thriller' which aired November 1, 1960.

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True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne. New York. 1977. Dutton. 0525223657. 341 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Neil Stuart.  

DESCRIPTION - In 1940s Los Angeles, an unidentified murder victim is found bisected in a shadowy lot. A catchy nickname is given her  in jest-'The Virgin Tramp'-and suddenly a 'nice little homicide that would have drifted off the front pages in a couple of days' becomes a storm center. Two brothers, Tom and Des Spellacy, are at the heart of this powerful novel of Irish-Catholic life in Southern California just after World War II. Played in the film version by Robert Duvall and Robert De Niro respectively, Tom is a homicide detective and Des is a priest on the rise within the Church. The murder investigation provides the background against which are played the ever changing loyalties of the two brothers. Theirs is a world of favors and fixes, power and promises, inhabited by priests and pimps, cops and contractors, boxers and jockeys and lesbian fight promoters and lawyers who know how to put the fix in. A fast-paced and often hilarious classic of contemporary fiction, True Confessions is about a crime that has no solutions, only victims. More important, it is about the complex relationship between Tom and Des Spellacy, each tainted with the guilt and hostility that separate brothers.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Gregory Dunne (May 25, 1932 – December 30, 2003) was an American writer. He began his career as a journalist for Time magazine before expanding into writing criticism, essays, novels, and screenplays. He often collaborated with his wife, Joan Didion. Dunne was born in Hartford, Connecticut and was a younger brother of author Dominick Dunne. He was the son of Dorothy Frances (née Burns) and Richard Edwin Dunne (1894–1946), a hospital chief of staff and heart surgeon. John was the fifth of six children in the family. John's maternal grandfather, Dominick Francis Burns (1857–1940), founded the Park Street Trust Company. John Dunne developed a severe stutter as a child and took up writing to express himself. He learned to manage it by observing others. He attended the Portsmouth Abbey School and graduated from Princeton University in 1954, where he was a member of Tiger Inn. Dunne started working as a journalist in New York City for Time magazine. He credited the political essayist Noel Parmentel as a mentor in many ways. In the late 1950s, he met Joan Didion in New York City, where she was an editor at Vogue. After they married in 1964, the couple moved to a remote house on the California coast; Didion worked on a novel to follow her debut Run, River, and Dunne on a book about the California grape pickers' strike. They wrote a jointly bylined column for the Saturday Evening Post magazine for years. Dunne and Didion gradually picked up writing work from book publishers and magazines, traveled together on journalism assignments, and established a working pattern that served for the next 40 years. They had a constant advising, consulting, and editing collaboration. Critically acclaimed bestselling books followed for each, including Dunne's The Studio, his nonfiction account of 20th Century Fox. They also collaborated on a series of screenplays, including The Panic in Needle Park (1971), A Star Is Born (1976), and True Confessions (1981), an adaptation of Dunne's novel of the same name. He wrote a nonfiction book about Hollywood, Monster: Living Off the Big Screen. As a literary critic and essayist, Dunne was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His essays were collected in two books, Quintana & Friends (1980) and Crooning (1990). He wrote several novels, among them True Confessions, based loosely on the Black Dahlia murder, and Dutch Shea, Jr. He was the writer and narrator of the 1990 PBS documentary L.A. is It with John Gregory Dunne, in which he guided viewers through Los Angeles's cultural landscape. Dunne and Didion later moved to Manhattan. He died there of a heart attack on December 30, 2003.[9] His final novel, Nothing Lost, which was in galleys at the time of his death, was published in 2004. Dunne married Didion on January 30, 1964, at Mission San Juan Bautista in California. He was 31 and she 29. They contemplated filing for divorce in 1969, as Didion famously wrote in one of her essays. Unable to have children, in 1966 they adopted a baby at birth and named her Quintana Roo, after the Mexican state. Quintana died in 2005 at age 39 after a series of illnesses. Dunne was uncle to actors Griffin Dunne (who co-starred in An American Werewolf in London) and Dominique Dunne (who co-starred in Poltergeist). Didion wrote and published The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), a memoir of the year following his death, during which their daughter was seriously ill. It won critical acclaim and the National Book Award.

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Ask For Me Tomorrow by Margaret Millar. New York. 1976. Random House. 0394408837. 179 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Gilda Decker hires Tom Aragon to go to Mexico to search for her first husband, B.J. Lockwood, because she has heard that he has amassed a fortune there. Her present husband is a helpless invalid and dying and she wants her share of Lockwood's money. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Margaret Ellis Millar (nee Sturm) (February 5, 1915 - March 26, 1994) was an American-Canadian mystery and suspense writer. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, she was educated at the Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate Institute and the University of Toronto. She moved to the United States after marrying Kenneth Millar (better known under the pen name Ross Macdonald). They resided for decades in the city of Santa Barbara, which was often utilized as a locale in her later novels under the pseudonyms of San Felice or Santa Felicia. The Millars had a daughter who died in 1970.

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Bird Dog by Philip Reed. New York. 1997. Pocket Books. 0671001639. 291 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Eric Peterson.  

DESCRIPTION - Harold Dodge is pushing fifty, going gray, and carrying a few extra pounds. He's a good man, always looking to help people out. But in a less-than-perfect world - that is, Los Angeles - good men sometimes have to do bad things. Now Harold's in a friend's car - and in a spot. A pair of hired repo men in a stolen Buick are trying to run him off the freeway and into an early grave. But the cops pull him over first - a blessing, except for one little thing, Harold's got a dead body in the trunk. It all started because Harold has a weakness for killer legs. And in her spike heels, Marianna Perado is the kind of woman who makes guys like Harold leap first and look later. When she asks him to help her ‘unwind' a rip-off deal at Joe Covo's dealership, where Harold once bird-dogged suckers into buying used cars, he jumps . . . and lands in a cesspool of corruption.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Reed is a former police reporter who turned to writing mysteries, non-fiction books, plays and screenplays. His latest novel, Off & Running, is a darkly funny thriller about a desperate biographer who kidnaps his celebrity subject. We can only wonder how much of the novel was inspired by Reed's experience writing his first book, Candidly Allen Funt, an autobiography of the 1960s TV legend. Reed's first novel, the “car noir” thriller, Bird Dog, was nominated for the Edgar and Anthony awards and optioned by Hollywood seven times. His many other books include Low Rider, Marquis de Fraud, Free Throw, In Search of the Greatest Golf Swing and Wild Cards, a non-fiction account of a year spent playing blackjack in casinos across the country with a professional card counter. He lives in Long Beach, California.

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The Redbreast by Jo Nesbø. New York. 2007. Harper. 9780061133992. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. 521 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Stephen Parker.  

DESCRIPTION - Police Detective Harry Hole has made a terrible mistake. An embarrassment in the line of duty has pulled him off his usual beat. Reassigned to mundane surveillance tasks, he reluctantly agrees to monitor neo-Nazi activities in Oslo. But as Hole is drawn into an underground world of illegal gun trafficking, brutal beatings, and sexual extortions, he soon learns that he must act fast to prevent an international conspiracy from unfolding. Trapped in the crosshairs of the man with all the answers, Harry Hole plunges headlong into a mystery with roots deep in the past. His investigation takes him back to Norway's darkest hour - when members of the young nation's government collaborated with leaders of Nazi Germany. Dredging up a painful history of denial, Hole turns his attention to the Norwegian troops who fought for Adolf Hitler on the Eastern front. Branded by their countrymen as traitors, the soldiers who survived the brutal Russian winter - the hunger, fear, cold, grenades, and snipers - returned home as scapegoats of a nation's atonement. Sixty years later, old grudges and betrayals appear to have been laid to vest, until Hole realizes that someone has begun to pick off the surviving soldiers one by one. With only his troubled, guilt-ridden conscience as a guide, Hole must move quickly through the traps and mirrors of a twisted criminal mind. But as his sanity slips in a slow burn of anger and alcohol, his mistakes continue to pile up. And if he fails to quicken the pace, Norway's darkest hour since World War II just might lie in the future.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jo Nesbø is a musician, songwriter, economist, and one of Europe's most critically acclaimed and successful crime writers today. His first novel featuring Police Detective Harry Hole was an instant hit in Norway, winning the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel - the most prestigious crime-writing award in Northern Europe. In 2004, THE REDBREAST was voted the ‘Best Norwegian Crime Novel Ever Written' by members of Norwegian book clubs. Nesbø lives in Oslo.

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The Jazz Bird by Craig Holden. New York. 2001. Simon & Schuster. 0743212967. 314 pages. hardcover. Cover: Jackie Seow.  

DESCRIPTION - An exquisitely written novel of love and betrayal, of money and power, set at the apex of that time of glitz and innocence known as the Jazz Age. . . CINCINNATI, 1927... Lawyer George Remus became the country's biggest bootlegger, grossing over $80 million until his arrest. Upon his release from prison, he learns that his beautiful wife, Imogene, has left him and that his bank accounts are empty. On the morning of their divorce, he runs her car off the road in the middle of rush hour in Eden Park and shoots her to death. Shocked and fascinated by this horrible crime, the country gears up for a sensational trial pitting the man known as ‘‘the king of the bootleggers'' against Chief Prosecutor Charlie Taft, the youngest son of the former president. The trial is a national spectacle, a lens focused on the fabulous rise and fall of the Remus empire and the tragic love story within it, and an attempt to answer some tantalizing questions: What actually happened to the fortune? What are the motives of the federal agent who brought Remus down? What complex emotions and desires, leading ultimately to the ruin of three men, really lie within the heart of the woman known as the Jazz Bird? Based on a true story, The Jazz Bird is at once a love story, a crime novel, and the tale of the courtroom battle between two powerful men whose respective futures hang in the balance.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Craig Holden is the author of four previous novels: The Jazz Bird, The River Sorrow, The Last Sanctuary, and Four Corners of Night. He lives in Michigan.

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The Birds of Prey by John Ralston Saul. New York. 1978. McGraw Hill. 0070548609. 247 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - THE BIRDS OF PREY, a political novel based in Gaullist France, was an international best seller. On a May night in 1968, the plane carrying the French Chief of Staff General Ailleret explodes over the island of REunion in the Indian Ocean, killing all aboard except for one. Four years later, writer Charles Stone is drawn irresistibly into the mystery that still surrounds the General's death.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Ralston Saul (born June 19, 1947) is a Canadian author, essayist, and President of International PEN. As an essayist, Saul is particularly known for his commentaries on the nature of individualism, citizenship and the public good; the failures of manager-, or more precisely technocrat-, led societies; the confusion between leadership and managerialism; military strategy, in particular irregular warfare; the role of freedom of speech and culture; and his critique of contemporary economic arguments.

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Out of Sight by Elmore Leonard. New York. 1996. Delcorte Press. 0385308485. 296 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Artparts Studio.  

DESCRIPTION - Deputy U.S. marshal Karen Sisco is just stopping off to serve a summons and complaint on Florida's Glades Prison. She's all decked out in her black Chanel suit and heels, but ready with her pump-action shotgun when the breakout begins, minutes after she pulls into the prison parking lot. But she's not ready for Jack Foley, the celebrity con who disarms her, invites her to climb into the trunk of her own car, and then joins her as his pal Buddy guns the blue Caprice onto the highway, heading for freedom. Squeezed into a trunk littered with handcuffs and tactical gear, the escapee bank robber is a perfect gentleman who shares her passion for movies and wonders if it would be different if they'd met in a bar. Karen escapes and they do meet again. Only this time she's part of the federal task force hunting the escapees. This time she's sitting in the bar of the Detroit Westin, nursing a sour mash and watching a blizzard outside. This time Foley finds her. First come cocktails and conversation. Then Time Out. In Karen's suite. ‘You like taking risks,' she says. ‘So do I.' Next morning Foley's gone and Karen's out to get him. She cruises Detroit's mean streets and boxing hangouts looking for Foley, Buddy, and a hard case named Maurice, one step behind them as they plot the biggest heist of their careers - and a double cross that will leave only one man holding the goods. This time Karen means business as she races toward a hair-raising climax that careens pell-mell into suspense-writing history.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elmore John Leonard Jr. (born October 11, 1925), better known as Elmore Leonard, is an American novelist and screenwriter. His earliest published novels in the 1950s were westerns, but Leonard went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures. Among his best-known works are GET SHORTY, OUT OF SIGHT, HOMBRE, MR. MAJESTYK and RUM PUNCH, which was filmed as Jackie Brown. Leonard's short stories include ones that became the films 3: 10 to Yuma and The Tall T, as well as the current TV series on FX, Justified.

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In the Hat by Dannie Martin. New York. 1997. Simon & Schuster. 0684833352. 272 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by John Gall.  

DESCRIPTION - Dannie Martin went to the toughest writing school on the planet - jail. Now, he writes to tell us stories from that world he left behind, the hard but somehow brutally honest world of the career criminal. Martin offers the story of Vernon Coy, a pimp and small-time bank robber who's living the easy life with two girls and a rooster. Of course, the easy life never stays easy for long. What Vern doesn't know is that he's in the hat. There's a little ritual unique prison gangs. When someone crosses your gang, his name gets put in the hat with a bunch of blank slips of paper. Whoever draws the slip with the name on it is expected to make sure that this someone ends up dead before the next lockdown. Since Vern's on the outside, killing him won't be that simple or that quick, but if the Duboce White Boys have their way, it won't be long before Vern is just another body with tag on its toe.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dannie "Red Hog" Martin wrote more than 50 dispatches about life behind bars for The Chronicle from 1986 to 1992, and then collaborated with his editor at the paper, Peter Sussman, on a best-selling book about his life as a convicted bank robber and their fight for his right to write. Mr. Martin and The Chronicle took a federal lawsuit all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in pursuit of a prisoner's journalistic rights and ultimately lost. But along the way, Mr. Martin gained worldwide support and picked up a slew of press awards. His reputation as a First Amendment figure was such that after he died of heart failure at home in Montgomery, Alabama on December 24, 2013 at age 74.

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Cage Five Is Going to Break by E. Richard Johnson. New York. 1970. Harper & Row. 149 pages. hardcover. Jacket photo by Vince Alosa.  

DESCRIPTION - His name was Stacy Tate, and he'd left a string at forty robberies around the country and had been convicted on only four of them, which had been enough to put him in Murphy Farm. Stacy was a solid-looking man, as hard and as tough as any man the steel-mill slums of Pittsburgh had ever put on the pistol circuit. He had the fight-scarred hands and snake-quick temper to prove it, and he'd had to prove it a few times during his first year at Murphy. That, plus his ability to keep his guts intact, had made him cage boss. A Yankee cage boss in a Southern prison. A prison that hadn't much going for it-cockroaches, bean fields, shotgun guards, and the ‘Smith & ‘Wesson Line.' And Captain Hans Hartmann and his Hundred - who were as tough as Stacy or tougher. In spite at which, Stacy had made a Plan . . . a plan that would, he hoped, get him out at Murphy Farm. Him and his five cell mates. He supposed that if everything worked right, absolutely right, all six of them might make it. But that was a pretty big ‘if' to be tossing around.  E. RICHARD JOHNSON, whose earlier novels have won him the respect of critics and the growing interest of readers across the country (and overseas), has written a rough, exciting novel which pulls the reader into and along with it-and which might just shake up a few people and places in our Southern prison system.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Emil Richard Johnson (born 1938 in Prentice, Wisconsin ; died December 1997 ) was an American writer of crime fiction. Johnson came from a large family; his ancestors were German immigrants. After graduating from the school in his hometown, he volunteered for the army . There he served in different positions at various locations and was eventually promoted to the rank of Sergeant. Johnson left the army in 1960, but had trouble integrating into civilian life. With no fixed abode, he entered into a life of crime. In 1962 during a robbery in Minnesota Johnson shot a security guard. He already had two convictions and as a result was sentenced to forty years in prison at the State Prison of Stillwater in Minnesota. In prison, Johnson began writing out of boredom. As a recreational hunter and angler he wrote articles about these topics, in addition to short stories and puzzles for children's magazines. His debut novel, Death on Silver Street ( Silver Street ), proved to be his literary breakthrough. Audiences and critics alike were enthusiastic, and the novel won an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America in 1969. He shared the prize with Dorothy Uhnak for the novel Murder girl with reservation ( The Bait ). His success as an author made Johnson wealthy. In the seventies however, he started taking drugs and stopped writing. In 1979 he had a number of overdoses, but survived and ended his dependence. He married and began to write again before he was pardoned in 1989. The marriage failed, and Johnson began to drink. He was found dead in his apartment on 18 December 1997.

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A Dog's Ransom by Patricia Highsmith. New York. 1972. Knopf. 0394480694. 275 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Wendell C. Minor.  

DESCRIPTION - A dog disappears. A ransom is demanded. The well-meaning, middle-aged New York couple - childless, generous - pay up. And pay again. The kidnapper - angry, perhaps psychotic - tricks them. The decent young policeman, obsessed with the case, falls deeper and deeper into involvement with the criminal, and with his victims. A ‘minor' crime inexorably grows into an agonizing and violent tragedy. This is the material from which the brilliant and subtle Patricia Highsmith has created another novel of psychological depth and tension. It confirms the judgment of her work expressed on the publication of her last book by The Times Literary Supplement: ‘She is the crime writer who comes closest to giving crime writing a good name.'

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. Educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek, she had her first novel, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, published in 1950 and saw it quickly made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite receiving little recognition in her native land during her lifetime, Highsmith, the author of more than twenty books, won the O. Henry Memorial Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de LittErarure Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland in 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.

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Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. New York. 1981. Putnam. 039912442x. 349 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Ron Walotsky.  

DESCRIPTION - In the realm of psychological suspense, Thomas Harris stands alone. exploring both the nature of human evil and the nerve-racking anatomy of forensic investigation, Harris unleashes a frightening vision of the dark side of our well-lighted world. In this extraordinary tale  - which preceded The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, Harris introduced the unforgettable character Dr. Hannibal Lecter. And in it, Will Graham  - the FBI man who hunted Lecter down  - risks his sanity and his life to duel a killer called . . . The Red Dragon A quiet summer night.a neat suburban house.and another happy family is shattered  - the latest victims of a grisly series of hideous sacrificial killings that no one understands, and no one can stop. Nobody lives to tell of the unimaginable carnage. Only the blood-stained walls bear witness. All hope rests on the Special Agent Will Graham, who must peer inside the killer's tortured soul to understand his rage, to anticipate and prevent his next vicious crime. Desperate for help, Graham finds himself locked in a deadly alliance with the brilliant Dr. Hannibal Lecter  - the infamous mass murderer who Graham put in prison years ago. As the imprisoned Lecter tightens the reins of revenge, Graham's feverish pursuit of the Red Dragon draws him inside the warped mind of a psychopath,, into an unforgettable world of demonic ritual and violence, beyond the limits of human terror.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Harris (born April 11, 1940) is an American author and screenwriter, best known for a series of suspense novels about his most famous character, Hannibal Lecter. All of his works have been made into films, the most notable being the multi-Oscar winning The Silence of the Lambs, which became only the third film in Academy Award history to sweep the Oscars in major categories.

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The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carre. New York. 1964. Coward McCann. 256 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Ben Feder Inc.

  
DESCRIPTION - This brilliant novel adds John le Carre's name to the microscopically small list of really great writers of espionage fiction. In truth, it does a great deal more. It is the spy novel to end all spy novels. It dis- patches the spun-sugar secret agents of recent fame back to their comic-opera Graustarks forever. Its central figure, Leamas, whose mission is to trap the top spy of East Berlin, is a creation of astonishing reality and authenticity. The plot he sets in motion, and later becomes the principal victim of, is a thing of magnificent complexity. Also of far-reaching implications. For the tension within Leamas is strikingly contemporary. It is the tension of a committed man unable to come to terms with the utterly ruthless machine he serves. Only in Arthur Koestler's DARKNESS AT NOON and Graham Greene's ‘burnt-out cases' can any comparison be found. THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD IS a novel of the first order - terrifying in its significance, impressive in its actuality, awesome in its high political import. It happens also to be immensely thrilling.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931), pen name John le CarrE, is a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, Cornwell worked for the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6, and began writing novels under a pen name. His third novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) became an international best-seller, and it remains one of his best-known works. Following the success of this novel, he left MI6 to become a full-time author. Le CarrE has established himself as a writer of espionage fiction. In 2008, The Times ranked le CarrE 22nd on its list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945'. In 2011, he won the Goethe Medal, a yearly prize given by the Goethe Institute.

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Funeral in Berlin by Len Deighton. New York. 1965. Putnam. 312 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - FUNERAL IN BERLIN is a spy novel by Len Deighton. The protagonist, who is unnamed, travels to Berlin to arrange the defection of a Soviet scientist named Semitsa, this being brokered by Johnny Vulkan of the Berlin intelligence community. Despite his initial scepticism the deal seems to have the support of Russian security-chief Colonel Stok and Hallam in the British government's Home Office. The fake documentation for Semitsa needs to be precisely specified. In addition, an Israeli intelligence agent named Samantha Steel is involved in the case. But it soon becomes apparent that behind the facade of an elaborate mock funeral lies a game of deadly manoeuvres and ruthless tactics. A game in which the blood-stained legacy of Nazi Germany is enmeshed in the intricate moves of cold war espionage. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Leonard Cyril Deighton (born 18 February 1929) is a British military historian, cookery writer, and novelist. He is perhaps most famous for his spy novel The IPCRESS File, which was made into a film starring Michael Caine. Deighton was born in Marylebone, London, in 1929. His father was a chauffeur and mechanic, and his mother was a part-time cook. At the time they lived in Gloucester Place Mews near Baker Street. Deighton's interest in spy stories may have been partially inspired by the arrest of Anna Wolkoff, which he witnessed as an 11-year-old boy. Wolkoff, a British subject of Russian descent, was a Nazi spy. She was detained on 20 May 1940 and subsequently convicted of violating the Official Secrets Act for attempting to pass secret documents to the Nazis. After leaving school, Deighton worked as a railway clerk before performing his National Service, which he spent as a photographer for the Royal Air Force's Special Investigation Branch. After discharge from the RAF, he studied at St Martin's School of Art in London in 1949, and in 1952 won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1955. While he was at the RCA he became a ‘lifelong friend' of fellow designer Raymond Hawkey, who later designed covers for his early books. Deighton then worked as an airline steward with BOAC. Before he began his writing career he worked as an illustrator in New York and, in 1960, as an art director in a now defunct London advertising agency, Sharps Advertising. He is credited with creating the first British cover for Kerouac's On the Road. He has since used his drawing skills to illustrate a number of his own military history books. Following the success of his first novels, Deighton became The Observer's cookery writer and produced illustrated cookbooks. In September 1967 he wrote an article in the Sunday Times Magazine about Operation Snowdrop - an SAS attack on Benghazi during World War II. The following year David Stirling would be awarded substantial damages in libel from the article. He also wrote travel guides and became travel editor of Playboy, before becoming a film producer. After producing a film adaption of his 1968 novel Only When I Larf, Deighton and photographer Brian Duffy bought the film rights to Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop's stage musical Oh, What a Lovely War! He had his name removed from the credits of the film, however, which was a move that he later described as ‘stupid and infantile.' That was his last involvement with the cinema. Deighton left England in 1969. He briefly resided in Blackrock, County Louth in Ireland. He has not returned to England apart from some personal visits and very few media appearances, his last one since 1985 being a 2006 interview which formed part of a ‘Len Deighton Night' on BBC Four. He and his wife Ysabele divide their time between homes in Portugal and Guernsey.

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Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess. New York. 1966. Norton. 240 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - TREMOR OF INTENT is an espionage novel by the English author Anthony Burgess. First published in 1966, it was in many ways a reaction to the heavy-handed, humorless spy fiction of John Le CarrE, and to Ian Fleming's James Bond, a character that Burgess felt to be a relic of imperialism. In YOU'VE HAD YOUR TIME, the second part of his Confessions, Burgess relates that the title came to him on a hungover morning when his hand began to shake. ‘That,' his wife said, ‘is tremor of intent.' The subtitle, ‘An Eschatological Spy Novel,' refers to the novel's depiction of the Cold War as a form of hostile symbiosis, an ‘ultimate conflict' in which ‘good' and ‘evil' are no longer adequate terms. In Burgess's view, Russia and the West formed a duoverse, a yin and yang. The novel confused critics at the time, as it straddled the lines between serious and comic fiction, popular genre storytelling and metaphysical philosophy. The completely amoral Agent Hiller of MI6 journeys to the city of Yarylyuk aboard a passenger ship called the ‘Polyolbion.' His mission is to infiltrate a convention of Soviet scientists and bring back to Britain his childhood friend Roper, who has defected to Russia. Along the way, he meets the sexually precocious 16-year-old Clara, the voluptuous femme fatale Miss Devi, and the shadowy tycoon Theodorescu (modeled loosely on Orson Welles).

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Anthony Burgess Wilson,(25 February 1917 - 22 November 1993) - who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess - was an English writer. From relatively modest beginnings in a Manchester Catholic family in the North of England, he eventually became one of the best known English literary figures of the latter half of the twentieth century. Although Burgess was predominantly a comic writer, the dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange remains his best known novel. In 1971 it was adapted into a highly controversial film by Stanley Kubrick, which Burgess said was chiefly responsible for the popularity of the book. Burgess produced numerous other novels, including the Enderby quartet, and Earthly Powers, regarded by most critics as his greatest novel. He also worked as a literary critic, writing studies of classic writers, most notably James Joyce. He was a longtime literary critic for The Observer and The Guardian. Burgess was also an accomplished musician and linguist. He composed over 250 musical works, including a first symphony around age 18, wrote a number of libretti, and translated, among other works, Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King and Carmen.

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Journey Into Fear by Eric Ambler. New York. 1940. Knopf. 276 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Returning to his hotel room after a late-night flirtation with a cabaret dancer at an Istanbul bar, Graham is surprised by an intruder with a gun. What follows is a nightmare of intrigue for the English armaments engineer as he makes his way home aboard an Italian freighter. Among the passengers are a couple of Nazi assassins intent on preventing his returning to England with plans for a Turkish defense system, the seductive cabaret dancer and her manager husband, and a number of surprising allies. Thrilling, intense, and masterfully plotted, JOURNEY INTO FEAR is a classic suspense tale from one of the founders of the genre. Eric Ambler is often said to have invented the modern suspense novel. Beginning in 1936, he wrote a series of novels that were touted for their realism, in which he introduced ordinary protagonists who are thrust into political intrigue they are ill prepared to deal with. In the process he paved the way for such writers as John Le Carre, Len Deighton, and Robert Ludlum.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric Clifford Ambler (28 June 1909 - 22 October 1998) was an influential British author of spy novels who introduced a new realism to the genre. Ambler also used the pseudonym Eliot Reed for books co-written with Charles Rodda.Ambler's best known works are probably The Mask of Dimitrios (1939) (originally published under the title A Coffin for Dimitrios), which was made into a film in 1944, and The Light of Day (1962), filmed in 1964 as Topkapi. He was also a successful screenwriter and lived in Los Angeles in his later years. Amongst other classic movies based on his work are Journey into Fear (1943), starring Joseph Cotten, and an original screenplay, The October Man (1947). He wrote the screenplay for A Night to Remember about the sinking of the Titanic, along with many other screenplays, particularly those concerning stories and adventures at sea. He published his autobiography in 1985, Here Lies Eric Ambler. A recurring theme in Ambler's books is the amateur who finds himself unwillingly in the company of hardened criminals or spies. Typically, the protagonist is out of his depth and often seems for much of the book a bumbling anti-hero, yet eventually manages to surprise himself as well as the professionals by a decisive action that outwits his far more experienced opponents. This plot is used, for example, in Journey into Fear, The Light of Day and Dirty Story. In Ambler's books, unlike in most other spy novels, the protagonist is rarely a professional spy, or a policeman or counter-intelligence operative. A number of Ambler's characters feature in more than one novel: Andreas Zaleshoff and his sister Tamara in Uncommon Danger and Cause for Alarm, Charles Latimer in The Mask of Dimitrios and The Intercom Conspiracy, Arthur Abdel Simpson in The Light of Day and Dirty Story, and Zia Haki appears as a Colonel Haki of the Turkish secret police in The Mask of Dimitrios and Journey Into Fear and is mentioned as a General Haki in The Light of Day.

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The Viper's Kiss by Paris Aristides. Philadelphia. 2001. Intrigue Press. 1890768383. Translated from the Greek by Rebecca Koutsoudis. 294 pages. hardcover. Cover: Paul Kepple & Timothy Crawford.  

DESCRIPTION - One of the three premier releases in Intrigue's new WorldKrime series, THE VIPER'S KISS is a refreshing return to the hardboiled, masculine edge of detective fiction, as well as an exciting example of the international mystery. Middle-aged private eye Chrisostomos Zaras is given a break from chasing adulterers when a whiskey smuggler hires him to find a missing thief along with a lost fortune. Leaving his native country of Greece for the tension-filled shores of Cyprus, Zaras immediately seeks out the island's criminal network. Zaras' only link to the nefarious underground operating in the town of Limassol is the beautiful and elusive Lena, secretary and mistress to the mob, whose motives, though plainly stated, he suspects are far more dubious. With the help of his taxi-driver side-kick; Zaras uncovers a plot involving Greek mobsters, drug trafficking, corrupt officials, and murderous Turks, with hidden agendas around every corner.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paris Aristides was born in Cyprus inn February, 1958. He studied Political Science in Athens and Paris. The Viper’s Kiss was published in Greek by Nea Sinnora Publications in 1988. It went on to become a 24-episode Greek television series.

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With My Knives I Know I'm Good by Julian Rathbone. New York. 1970. Putnam. 217 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Jay J. Smith.  

DESCRIPTION - This dazzlingly, original suspense-adventure stars a new kind of hero. His name is Aziz Milyutin; he is an Azeri Turk from the Caspian Sea, and he is by profession a knife thrower. Currently touring with a carnival through the Middle East, his great dream is to save enough money to one day own his own piece of land in his native Turkey - to regain the dignity of his farming forefathers. When he is offered a lucrative job in a nightclub in Beirut, his suspicions are not at first aroused, but then too many people become interested in him, watchful and questioning. And when among the ruins of Baalbek he witnesses a murder, he discovers that he has been dropped into a world of intrigue, seduction and sudden death. Bewildered, on alien soil, unable to identify his enemies - or even to understand why he is a target - Aziz finds himself completely alone. But on his side he has a strange assortment of weapons: the luck of the innocent; an unshakable, inbred desire for revenge; his own strong character, earthy, but honorable, simple, yet cunning - and four gleaming silver knives.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julian Christopher Rathbone (10 February 1935 - 28 February 2008) was an English novelist. Julian Rathbone attended Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was a contemporary of Bamber Gascoigne and Sylvia Plath. At Cambridge he took tutorials with FR Leavis, for whom, without having ever been what might be described as a 'Leavisite', he retained an abiding respect. After university Rathbone lived in Turkey for three years, making a living by teaching English. While in Turkey he heard that his father had been killed in a road accident at the age of sixty, an event to which Rathbone would return when himself the same age, in Blame Hitler. On his return to England jobs in various London schools were followed by the post of Head of English at the comprehensive school in Bognor Regis, West Sussex. Having originally aspired to be an actor or a painter, Rathbone had also taken up writing and by the end of the 1960s had had three novels published, all set in Turkey and informed by a background of which he had intimate knowledge. In 1973 Rathbone finally gave up teaching and left for Spain with the woman who would become his wife and lifelong companion, determined from then on to make his living by writing. Back in England and after some financially lean years Rathbone found his tenacity beginning to pay off. Booker Prize short-listings in 1976 and 1979 brought critical recognition, and although major commercial success remained elusive Rathbone's work appeared regularly, gaining a loyal readership and increasing popularity both at home and abroad. His novels continued to display interests and talents across several genres, from mainstream through thrillers to historical fiction. His novel of 1066, The Last English King, published 1997, achieved considerable commercial success and has been optioned for film several times without having yet made it to the screen. As a writer of non-fiction Rathbone made a lasting and original contribution to Wellington and Peninsular War studies with his Wellington's War, 1984. Various threads run through Rathbone's novels over their forty-year span. Standing firmly in the 19th Century tradition with its belief in the primacy of the writer's imagination and its consequent freedom to explore human life in all its aspects, Rathbone always refused to be tied to a single genre, time or place or character in undertaking this exploration. An ostensible thriller may be just as much a study of relationships, an apparently mainstream novel an investigation of crime, a work of historical fiction a meditation on contemporary issues. In blurring and blending genres in this way, for three decades or more in which the book market became increasingly obsessed with the typecasting and branding of books and their authors, Rathbone can be seen as having explored and questioned the nature of genre itself, its scope and limitations. Wherever the definitions of a particular genre threatened to restrict his enquiry into the human condition, Rathbone never hesitated to push it into wider territory. In a climate of increasing specialisation expected of novelists by the marketplace, this was an unfashionable approach to take, with arguably a heavy commercial cost over the years as Rathbone went his own way and refused to seek or accept any label or badge of identification which might increase sales but confine his activities as a writer. Rathbone in fact created four characters who appear in more than one of his books, permitting a certain grouping around each of them while never taking over the heterogeneous spirit of his work or deflecting him from the pursuit of wider fictional interests. First was Inspector Jan Argand (The Euro-Killers, Base Case, Watching The Detectives). Then the ‘Joseph' of Joseph (Booker nomination 1979) makes his reappearance as Charlie Boylan in A Very English Agent and later as Eddie Bosham in Birth Of A Nation, as Rathbone follows the thread of events from the war in the Peninsula through the world of German exiles taking refuge in early Victorian London and on to the early years of the modern USA. Two books for Serpent's Tail - Accidents Will Happen and Brandenburg Concerto - focused on Renate Fechter, head of a German squad of Eco-police. Then finally Rathbone created a British private investigator, Chris Shovelin, for the two recent books Homage and As Bad As It Gets for Allison and Busby. Although diverse and strong characters in themselves, none of these four ever seemed likely to take over the oeuvre as a whole. Rathbone remained committed to diversity of inspiration rather than the formulaic approach to which concentration on a single character can lead. Leavis, although Rathbone never shared his cultural aridity, was a long-term presence in the novelist's background as a man who insisted on the power and importance of imaginative literature. In A Last Resort, written around the time of Leavis's death and giving a brilliant portrayal of a Britain making itself ripe for Thatcherism, the ferocious Cambridge don makes a brief appearance in the intellectual life of a gifted English student at a school not unlike the one Rathbone had taught in until a few years previously. As a writer perhaps the nearest Rathbone came to an acknowledged antecedent was Graham Greene, whose weaving of the thriller and mainstream strands of fiction, together with in-depth exploration of wider spiritual and political issues often set in foreign locations, clearly struck many chords both with Rathbone's vocational subject-matter and belief in the novelist's ability to address himself to all aspects of human life on as broad a front as he likes, with the finished work of fiction as the only credential he needs. Greene remained an icon with Rathbone throughout his writing life, as did the different figure of James Joyce, object of Rathbone's greatest reverence although rarely exercising any overt influence in his writing. A Last Resort is probably the most Joycean of Rathbone's books, in its use of accumulation of mundane detail to build up an almost surreal portrait of a country whose identity is dissolving in front of its face. To Joyce himself Rathbone paid the ultimate compliment of constantly rereading without seeking to imitate. Rathbone was a man of what might be called the classic Left. After public school and Cambridge three years in Turkey told him all he needed to know about poverty, and the next decade and a half of teaching in British secondary schools made him expert in the class system of his own country. His politics were those of tolerance and libertarianism, with an innate distrust of self-serving hierarchies and a cynicism towards power-structures and their manipulation of the world, in particular the world of the helpless. In his fiction, much influenced by Greene, he always made social and historical context part of the weave of the narrative. Twenty years ago, in Zdt and The Pandora Option, he dealt with food as a new weapon in the armoury of the superpowers, and in the early 1990s (Sand Blind) with the capacity of those same superpowers to fabricate wars in the interests of their own technologies and consumer needs. In Trajectories (1998) he presents a nightmare vision of Britain in 2035 which seems more recognisable and likely with every year that passes. Over a writing career of forty years, during which the world might be said to have changed out of recognition, it is notable how few of Rathbone's preoccupations and perceptions have dated, while many have been prescient and remain as relevant as they ever were. In his latest book The Mutiny, dealing with the Indian rising against British rule in 1857, the same commitment to clarity of vision is evident, an equal openness to all experiences and forces involved in the events of the time, which continues to mark Rathbone down as unashamedly in the line of the great novelists of the 19th Century. The critic who took Rathbone to task for appearing to claim a superiority of approach to the professional historian in dealing with such contentious historical material was raising a question which Rathbone's whole career, and The Mutiny itself, was dedicated to answering. For a man of wide intellectual interests Rathbone produced relatively little outside his long list of novels. Much travelled, and loving foreign places, he always aspired to produce volumes of travel writing, but nothing in this direction ever came to fruition commercially. His one non-fictional publication was Wellington's War (1984), product of a fascination with Wellington which dated back to schooldays. Following within fifteen years of Elizabeth Longford's two-volume biography, which re-established Wellington as a subject for serious study, Rathbone's book is a radical and original departure from the normal run of biographical accounts. Based on detailed research into both Wellington's collected correspondence and the battlefields of the Peninsular War, it counterpoints extracts from the letters with Rathbone's own elucidations and comments. As well as uniquely conveying the immediacy of events through Wellington's thought-processes and human voice, Wellington's War does more than any other book on the subject to illustrate the dimension and brilliance of Wellington's genius. The Duke himself has a habit of cropping up in various of Rathbone's fictions, notably in Joseph and A Very English Agent and, more hauntingly, in Blame Hitler, the novel in which Rathbone writes about his own father. Rathbone described his own interest in Wellington as ‘probably Oedipal‘, and the Duke as ‘the ultimate father-figure'. Wellington's War remains unique not only in Rathbone's own work but also in the growing contemporary literature on Wellington.

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Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Mosley. New York. 1997. Norton. 0393045390. 208 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Debra Morton Hoyt. Jacket photograph by Harold Sinclair/Photonica.  

DESCRIPTION - ALWAYS OUTNUMBERED, ALWAYS OUTGUNNED introduces Walter Mosley's most compelling new character since the debut of his immortal detective Easy Rawlins: one Socrates Fortlow, a tough, brooding ex-convict determined to challenge and understand the violence and anarchy in his world - and in himself. Three decades ago, the young Socrates had, in a burst of drunken rage, murdered a man and a woman with his huge ‘rock-breaking hands.' Twenty-seven years of hard time in an Indiana prison followed. Now Socrates lives in a cramped two-room apartment in an abandoned building in Watts, scavenging bottles and delivering groceries for a supermarket. In each of the linked stories that comprise this richly brooding work, Socrates, like his namesake, explores philosophical questions of morality in a world beset with crime, poverty, and racism. He is an unforgettable presence and his perceptions cast a glow of somber lyricism upon an often harsh world. He is a creation of stunning originality; the book he inhabits is Mosley's most powerful and eloquent to date.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Mosley is the author of more than forty books, including eleven previous Easy Rawlins mysteries, the first of which, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, was made into an acclaimed film starring Denzel Washington. ALWAYS OUTNUMBERED was an HBO film starring Laurence Fishburne, adapted from Mosley's first Socrates Fortlow novel. A native of Los Angeles and a graduate of Goddard College, he holds an MFA from CCNY and lives in Brooklyn. New York. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and PEN America's Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Fear of the Dark by Gar Anthony Haywood. New York. 1988. St Martin's Press. 0312017960. Winner of the Private Eye Writers Of America Best First Private Eye Contest. 192 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Winner of the 1988 Best First P.I. Novel Contest, this promising debut introduces black private investigator Aaron Gunner, hired to find the white man who walked into the Acey Deuce bar in South Central Los Angeles to blow away the owner, J.T. Tennell and Buddy Dorris of the Brothers of Volition, a black activist group. Buddy's sister, Verna Gail, feels the murder isn't getting enough police attention and hires Gunner, a P.I. who's trying to quit the business. He discovers that the killer is Denny Townsend, a white supremacist working on the fringes of a campaign to elect Lew Henshaw, a politician running on a law-and-order platform. Before Gunner can talk to Townsend, he finds him shot to death in Gunner's car. The cops are suspicious of Gunner, who soon is framed for the killing of Townsend's friend and possible accomplice, Stanley Ferris. To save his own neck, and to keep L.A. from erupting into racial violence, Gunner must find the connection between the politician, a local drug dealer and the Brothers' charismatic leader, Roland Mayes.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gar Anthony Haywood (born May 22, 1954) is the award-winning author of three Aaron Gunner novels: YOU CAN DIE TRYING, FEAR OF THE DARK, and NOT LONG FOR THIS WORLD, as well as the Loudermilk series. He lives in Venice, California, with his two daughters.

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